For people who don’t read German (like me), here is the translation of @bittner’s letter:
Dear Mr. Bittner,
Thank you for your message. We are pleased that you rate the developments that we are making in the area of smartphones as positive. However, I can tell you fairly clearly that it is “more than unlikely” that we will move in this direction.
Android achieved a market share of 74.6 percent in July 2020, Apple’s iOS achieved a market share of 24.8 percent. That adds up to 99.4 percent of the global market. All other operating systems rank under the term “exotic” at best.
In a market in which the majority of customers - unlike you - primarily opt for the cheapest price, it is impossible for Gigaset to develop a new operating system (not even in cooperation) and establish it successfully on the market.
Accordingly, I of course passed your mail on to my colleagues in development, but I think it is unlikely that they will come to a different assessment than is.
The problem is not the “want”, but the billions of marketing dollars that Apple and Google and thousands of other smartphone providers are pumping into iOS and Android …
Sincerely,
Raphael Dörr
Dear Mr. Bittner,
thank you - I passed our entire exchange on to my colleagues.
Best regards
Raphael Dörr
@bittner, I doubt that any phone manufacturers are going to switch to Linux in the short term, but we should have a great deal of hope in the long term:
How does mobile Linux have any chance against Android and iOS when other OSes failed?
Why buy the Librem 5 when there are no apps for it?
If Purism can get Phosh to a good enough state, it will actually cost phone makers less to use Linux than Android, because they won’t have to pay licensing fees for Google Mobile Services, and they will freed from Microsoft’s patent racket which forces them to pre-install Microsoft’s apps.
It is worth pointing out that Gigaset is the manufacturer of the Volla Phone, so Gigaset is already making a Linux phone. I wonder if Raphael Dörr knows that someone is already doing the work to port the Gigaset GS290 to Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS, plus an AOSP derivative.
In my opinion, Gigaset is a poor choice for making a Linux phone, because they use MediaTek SoC’s which will never be supported by mainline Linux, because MediaTek refuses to release the source code for its kernels. This means that Gigaset phones can’t be supported long term, because MediaTek only supports its SoC’s for a couple years. Since the Mediatek Helio P23 MT6763 (16nm FF+) in the GS290 was released in Q3 2017, that means that the SoC is nearing the end of its support cycle, so it is unlikely that MediaTek will release driver or firmware updates for the chip. It is likely using Linux 4.14 (released in Nov 2017), which was the newest kernel supported by Android 9, and the kernel version is unlikely to ever be updated.
In addition, Gigaset is technically a violator of the GPL, because it is selling hardware with MediaTek’s Linux kernel without releasing the source code. Sadly, because Volla Phone isn’t the original manufacturer, it probably doesn’t have access to MediaTek’s original source code, so it can’t help us, although Gigaset could release the source code but Gigaset probably signed an NDA that prohibits it. For more info, see Comparing Linux Phones and download the spreadsheet.
If Gigaset had used Snapdragon, it could have avoided these problems, which is why I’m not excited about Volla Phone, even though I want the company to survive, since it seems to have its heart in the right place.